Aztec hieroglyphs
Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, a Stephanie Wood Work-in-Progress Report
| April 7, 2021 | ||
| 12:00 pm |
VIDEO
To view a recording of this remote event, FOLLOW THIS LINK.
This digital humanities project has as its focus the visual writing system developed by the Nahuas of central Mexico in pre-contact times and which lived on well after contact. This writing system bequeathed a rich historical and cultural corpus of manuscripts (codices) that infuse our knowledge of central Mexican indigenous peoples with respect for their ingenuity, diligent record keeping, appreciation for historical memory and narrative.
Winner of the CLLAS Faculty Seed Grant, Stephanie Wood is the Director of the Wired Humanities Projects and a Research Associate with the Center for Equity Promotion (CEQP) in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. Between 1992 and 2015, she taught on campus and directed dozens of theses in various departments, such as History, Latin American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, International Studies, and Romance Languages. But for more than a decade, her principal focus has been externally-funded digital reference and curricular projects on under-represented aspects of history (Mesoamerican and Native American), primarily with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She has been the Principal Investigator on eleven NEH projects and has held sub-awards on another two.
Scholar Stephanie Wood soon to launch glyph translation tool: “Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs”
A glyph translation tool: The Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs
Stephanie Wood, an ethnohistorian and specialist in Mesoamerican culture who is affiliated with the UO College of Education, will soon be launching the creation of a glyph translation tool, the “Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs,” which unites the work of scholars in Mexico, the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands.
The tool will be created with the participation of a Latinx student team at the UO. The result will be a free, online, searchable database of the atomic parts of compound glyphs, all named, annotated, and with attestations of the ways that they appear in compound glyphs in known 16th-century codices, such as the Codex Mendoza, the Codex Xolotl, and others. The resulting site will be at least trilingual, using Nahuatl, Spanish and English.
The goals of the Visual Lexicon are manifold: 1) to provide a tool for scholars deciphering glyphs in under-studied or newly discovered codices; 2) to help with the teaching and self-study of glyph decipherment; 3) to deepen our understanding of the Aztec writing system (reading order, phoneticism, regional styles, etc.); 4) to prepare pedagogical pathways that highlight Aztec cultural hallmarks; and, 5) to be merged with the online Nahuatl dictionary Wood serves from Oregon, besides standing alone .
This project is a collaboration with professor and principal investigator Benjamin D. Johnson at the University of Massachusetts, and it is funded out of his three-year grant from National Endowment for the Humanities.
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